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I recently had surgery, and at the time I came home, I had both my cat and one of my grandma's cats staying with me.

- Within hours of surgery, I wake up from a nap to my cat gently sniffing at my incisions with great alarm.

- I was not allowed to shower the first day after surgery, and the cats, seeing that The Large Cat is not observing its cleaning ritual, decided I must be gravely disabled and compensated by licking all the exposed skin on my arms, face, and legs.

- I currently have to sleep with a pillow over my abdomen because my cat insists on climbing on top of me and covering my incisions with her body while I sleep (which is very sweet but not exactly comfortable without the pillow). She also lays across me facing my bedroom door, presumably on guard for attackers who may try to harm me while I'm sleeping and injured.

That's love. 🐈‍⬛🐈❤️

#cat #cats

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person who has only watched one anime: what i really love about dungeon meshi is how it subverts our expectations of a typical anime by not sexualising women and having a good plot!

#shoujosei

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Life For Gaza: Each Cent Counts, Quenching the Thirst of Humanity in Gaza City

The Gaza Municipality is tasked with providing vital services such as water supply, waste management and sewage treatment. However, the widespread destruction in Gaza City has severely hampered the Municipality's ability to deliver even the most basic necessities to its residents. With limited access to water, the population faces a dire health and environmental crisis, especially affecting children.

By joining forces in this initiative, we cultivate hope and solidarity, fostering empathy and collaboration across communities while easing the hardships endured by those in Gaza. This collective effort reassures them that they are not alone in their struggle. The Gaza Municipality earnestly appeals for your support to help reinstate essential services, currently the foremost priority. In the northern regions of the Gaza Strip alone, over 500,000 individuals urgently require these services.

Where your donations will be directed:

- Water supply enhancement projects

- Maintenance of water wells

- Implementation of water desalination initiatives

- Management of waste collection and disposal systems

- Reconstruction of roads demolished during war

- Implementation of sewage water pumping and treatment schemes

- Execution of pest control and rodent eradication programs

#palestine #gaza

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Emmy magazine Carol Cutshall interview

“It was such a drastic change going into season two,” says Cutshall of the drama, returning May 12 to AMC and AMC+. “We went from the height of glamour, which we last saw during a Mardi Gras party, to the polar opposite in the premiere. When you look at Louis and Claudia in their shearling coats in Romania and the amount of mud and blood on them, those looks are built for surviving and searching and starting over.”

But glamour returns to their lives as the pair forge ahead in Paris. In short order, they are welcomed into a theatrical coven of thespians operating out of the Théâtre des Vampires. Seduced by their habit of living loudly and proudly — at least at night — Louis relaxes into his post-Lestat life, taking up photography and exploring his sexuality in subtle ways.

“The look I landed on for him was that of artists and café society, and French workwear with a little bit of a blue-collar look,” Cutshall says. “It’s not the finery that we are used to for Louis, but his fastidiousness in how he wears it — tucked and belted — is still there.”

There is a visual hierarchy among these old-world vampires. Louis wears the costume of the common man, placing him below the coven’s creative director, Armand (Assad Zaman), the so-called love of his life who was unmasked as an ancient vampire in season one. When they meet, Armand is dressed in warm colors and loosely draped outfits with open collars, fearlessly baring the neck — a vulnerable point for humans and vampires alike.

“We want to break away from the disguise he had in season one, because he is the mega predator,” Cutshall says. “He’s not threatened by anyone. So, in everything he does and wears, he can be like an animal who is not afraid to lie on their back and bare their belly.”

Claudia, meanwhile, sees kindred spirits in the coven’s distinctive personalities. She has grown intellectually beyond her eternally teenage shell and now uses vibrant clothes — like the dress she wears for their first theater outing — to grasp at an intangible womanhood. That signature dress and cape were scripted as lavender and white, but Cutshall dyed the fabric an orchid color and added a gray crosshatched cape that glows onscreen; the ensemble stands out against the make-do fashion of a post-war world.

“For Claudia to have this pristine dress made for her, and because she is seeing who she is for the first time, she needs to be the freshest flower there,” Cutshall says.

#claudia #louis de pointe du lac #armand #delainey hayles #jacob anderson #assad zaman #carol cutshall #iwtv costuming #iwtv #iwtv s2

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“…i was haunted by my brother’s death, by the abandonment of my sister…”

majority of the conversation around paul in the amc setting revolves around the question of whodunnit, jokes about him at the second dinner table scene of the pilot, or paralleling his mental illness to louis [a parallel the show admittedly draws upon - with louis stopping his suicide attempt bc “paul forever ruining grace’s wedding night, and [louis] not wanting to do the same to claudia on the anniversary of her escape”] what i intend to focus on, is the specific nature of paul’s complaints with respect to levi, and what paul and claudia represent to louis.

in the book, paul wants louis to sell the plantations & town homes they own in new orleans, and give louis the money so that paul could travel and become a missionary saving france from the godless jacobins. the paul that we’re introduced to in the show is… similar in motivation, but fundamentally divergent. tithe the money over to st. augustine’s so the house dont fall in on them, but the first dinner table goes as this after he says that:

whats of note too is the divergence of the draft v the pilot release. the show excises the freniere family w the exception of levi himself to drive home how paul’s objections to levi’s religious and ethnic background are overruled by the lingering shadow of jim crow.

paul is also reminded that his autonomy is conditional in this first dinner scene here: louis quips back to his point about sugarcane with “if daddy was still here, you’d be locked up in that asylum over in jackson”. its a reminder of the earlier point, but also speaks to something else.

bc of paul’s profound mental illness, he would never be allowed to live an autonomous life, much less hold authority over anyone: whether its the man of the house [as louis was in the du lac family], or as a bride [grace] or as the mother [florence].

this is strongly reminiscent of claudia — someone whos personal autonomy is entirely dependent on the purview of physically mature vampires by nature of permanently being trapped in the body of a preteen. it is also reminiscent of claudia in that louis in both cases plays a sort of savior in relation to them — whether its louis taking paul out of the asylum, or louis taking claudia out of the burning rooming home. louis views paul and claudia, especially claudia, as people that save him from his own self-loathing.. claudia somehow possessing this redemptive quality re: baby jesus…

louis loves both of them deeply, but as iwtv has established, love as a feeling does not exempt someone from enacting violence toward you. in fact, the very loved one that harmed you has an entire framework of rationalizing that violent act as being ‘for your[my] own good’ as is.

the title of this little post comes from the season one finale, where louis collapses in on himself to try to make sense of why he spared lestat, invoking paul and grace to create this red herring to the ‘murder of lestat’. but truly, the thread is false. louis did not abandon grace, and lestat’s death was only an attempted murder sabotaged by louis. modern day louis in the season finale triggers himself through daniel in order to provoke armand, the “protector of his pain”, to reveal himself + question him on the death of claudia, just as he questioned lestat on the death of paul in s1e6.

#yn. #iwtv #louis de pointe du lac #claudia #paul de pointe du lac #tldr: he ended on a good note w paul but a bad one w claudia & thats why hes so regretful/did the 2nd interview in 2022

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naming her onstage character ‘baby loulou’ is just…..

#yn. #claudia #sinister!!!

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🚨EMERGENCY! PLEASE READ!🚨

Moataz @moatazart, Mariam, and baby Maria are set to make the dangerous journey from Gaza City in the north to Rafah in the south. From there, God willing, they will enter Egypt.

HOWEVER, the money they had allocated to procure shelter and food while in Egypt was utterly depleted by exploitative fees and hidden costs, which we break down in this post. Moataz speaks more on the situation in this post and on his own blog @moatazart, which we ask people to follow and boost. They have a fund going to raise the remaining money, but the fund only has a week and a half left before it closes! They are not even halfway to their goal!

Please share what you can with Moataz’s family so they can find safety and security in Egypt! They have no one in Egypt with whom they can stay and currently nowhere near enough money to secure shelter! After all they have survived, please don’t let this young family be left vulnerable! If they cannot procure food and shelter, they will be extremely vulnerable not only to the dangers of homelessness, but to groups and individuals who prey on refugees!

Safety for Gazan refugees does not end with leaving Gaza! If this campaign is not finished in LESS THAN 2 WEEKS, they will be homeless in Egypt! They are so close to a fresh start, please don’t let all the risks they are taking to find safety be for nothing!

#palestine

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ldpdl, ethnicity, and the false monolith of blackness

there's this false tendency to think amc louis being made black is pandering, or a means of removing louis from his oh-so-detailed /sarcasm/ background in the books. i also find that people tend to not even understand what show louis's ethnic background is, despite rolin jones the showrunner and even the fictional louis both coalescing around this multigenerational explanation of the gens de couleur in new orleans, and how jim crow disempowered them.

I came around to his ethnicity a sort of interesting way which is through Lestat. [ … ] I was like lets give him a legitimate a third attempt at figuring how to be with somebody for the rest of his life and how to not repeat your mistakes. [ … ] I started from there so it had to be someone with some money cause he had to be with his own folks and I thought he wanted someone who could fight back and who could be a challenge and would force him to restrain himself. And nobody at AMC was interested in 7 seasons of the regretful plantation owner, so we made Louis come from a lineage that did have a plantation and did own slaves.

rolin jones in the s1 post-finale episode of the podcast names how he came to this understanding of louis's character. lestat, after failing to make a bride of his mother, and a concubine of nicki, was seeking for someone of a similar background, or the most approximate equivalent. he would not have been interested in louis if louis was an anglophone baptist black man descended from upper-south arrivals into new orleans, nor would he have been interested in louis if louis was a poor black creole honestly s1 does not give a good reading of claudia's ethnic bg in new orleans, but since she cannot understand french, we can presume shes either a poor creole removed from her cultural background with her vampiric adoption narrative in mind, or was also of an anglophone baptist black background like claudia was. louis coming from this fallen sort of gentry, the free gens de couleur, similar to that of the tvl lestat who came from this barren aristocracy dating back to the crusades, was key to lestat's long-term goals with louis.

Capital accrued from plantations of sugar and the blood of men who looked like my great grandfather but did not have his standing. But then decades of Jim Crow and the electrified light of a new century had vanquished any idea of a free man of color. - AMC IWTV 1x01

louis was of the first generations of the gens de couleur to be born, raised into, and face the institutional and personal ramifications of being viewed as black in america. this fuels much of the character's rage as he moves through storyville, trying to continue the similar modality of exploitation to the contrary of pretty baby with brooke shields, majority of the brothel circuit was statistically black girls + women being sexually pawned off to white men but ultimately failing to do so bc of the anglophone white american class that now rules over him. [tom anderson, alderman fenwick, finn o’shea starting out as louis’s subordinate then ending w/ him entering whiteness by having a sporting house throwing torches at louis’s brothel in s1e3]

By 1850, the free population of color, beset by the hostility of white supremacy, was economically diminished and residentially segregated. The Americanization of Louisiana, and in particular New Orleans, was completed before the state became the sixth to secede from the Union in 1861 in the struggle over the perpetuation of slavery. [link] The Democratic redeemers who came to power in 1877 lost no time in redefining the Negro's "place" in Louisiana life. They immediately restored the color line in the New Orleans public schools and offered silent support to de facto segregation practices in places of public accommodation. With the assistance of two landmark decisions by the United States Supreme Court, the redeemers soon dismantled the egalitarian legal apparatus put together piece by piece under the Radicals. Finally in 1890 they began to write their "final solution" into Louisiana law with a series of "separate but equal" statutes. Soon New Orleans Negroes were again segregated in virtually every public pursuit. [link]

#yn. #iwtv #louis de pointe du lac #claudia #lestat de lioncourt #tldr: louis’s real birth year is 1877

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Lmaooo i'm literally dying reading your tags from that poll asdfhfd armand does not want that baby lol

that man dont want nobody child !!! & b4 yall bring the rest of those books@ me marius dropped that racist caricature & 25 year old woman at book armand’s doorstep and they all went their own ways + were forgotten by anne

#yn. #yn answers

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one reason (white) queer people misuse the term homonationalism is that they see queerness (or whatever you want to call it) as naturally disaffiliated with the US empire. so they understand homonationalism as a divergence from a natural mutual antagonism between queerness and empire. they talk about homonationalism as if it's an exclusively "normie gay" project, and as if it's a divergence from, rather than a consequence of, the overall trajectory of western lgbtqia+ politics. ironically it’s that self-exceptionalization by the queer, on the basis of their queerness, that imbricates them in homonationalism. they produce themselves as a homonationalist subject, and reproduce homonationalism, every time they articulate their queerness as individualized freedom. and Puar actually anticipates all of this in her original theorization of homonationalism in Terrorist Assemblages, and that's why it really helps to go to the text instead of osmosing queer theory solely through tumblr posts (esp when tumblr is so white and the queer theorists are not): "Some may strenuously object to the suggestion that queer identities, like their 'less radical' counterparts, homosexual, gay, and lesbian identities, are also implicated in ascendant white American nationalist formations, preferring to see queerness as singularly transgressive of identity norms. This focus on transgression, however, is precisely the term by which queerness narrates its own sexual exceptionalism.

While we can point to the obvious problems with the emancipatory, missionary pulses of certain (U.S., western) feminisms and of gay and lesbian liberation, queerness has its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding impulse, indeed the very core of a queerness that claims itself as an anti-, trans-, or unidentity. The paradigm of gay liberation and emancipation has produced all sorts of troubling narratives: about the greater homophobia of immigrant communities and communities of color, about the stricter family values and mores in these communities, about a certain prerequisite migration from home, about coming-out teleologies. We have less understanding of queerness as a biopolitical project, one that both parallels and intersects with that of multiculturalism, the ascendancy of whiteness, and may collude with or collapse into liberationist paradigms. While liberal underpinnings serve to constantly recenter the normative gay or lesbian subject as exclusively liberatory, these same tendencies labor to insistently recenter the normative queer subject as an exclusively transgressive one. Queerness here is the modality through which 'freedom from norms' becomes a regulatory queer ideal that demarcates the ideal queer. ... I am thinking of queerness as exceptional in a way that is wedded to individualism and the rational, liberal humanist subject, what [Sara] Ahmed denotes as 'attachments' and what I would qualify as deep psychic registers of investment that we often cannot account for and are sometimes best seen by others rather than ourselves. 'Freedom from norms' resonates with liberal humanism’s authorization of the fully self-possessed speaking subject, untethered by hegemony or false consciousness, enabled by the life/stylization offerings of capitalism, rationally choosing modern individualism over the ensnaring bonds of family. In this problematic definition of queerness, individual agency is legible only as resistance to norms rather than complicity with them, thus equating resistance and agency.

... Queerness as automatically and inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population). Within that orientation of regulatory transgression, queer operates as an alibi for complicity with all sorts of other identity norms, such as nation, race, class, and gender, unwittingly lured onto the ascent toward whiteness. ... To be excused from a critique of one’s own power manipulations is the appeal of white liberalism, the underpinnings of the ascendancy of whiteness, which is not a conservative, racist formation bent on extermination, but rather an insidious liberal one proffering an innocuous inclusion into life."

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)

#jasbir k. puar #homonationalism #imperialism #queerness

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#svsss #<3

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#iwtv #louis begs for it then armand would let the first trimester pass b4 he aborts the fetus and DARVOs louis into thinking louis was at fault #or armand manipulates the blood in louis's body so louis rejects the baby like some inverse of the turning of madeleine type shit #armand will not allow that child to even be allowed to exist and will impress that lesson onto louis

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The fourth way that anticommunist extermination programs shaped the world is that they deformed the world socialist movement. Many of the global left-wing groups that did survive the twentieth century decided that they had to employ violence and jealously guard power or face annihilation. When they saw the mass murders taking place in these countries, it changed them. Maybe US citizens weren't paying close attention to what happened in Guatemala, or Indonesia. But other leftists around the world definitely were watching. When the world's largest Communist Party without an army or dictatorial control of a country was massacred, one by one, with no consequences for the murderers, many people around the world drew lessons from this, with serious consequences.

This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask:

"Who was right?"

In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit's unarmed party didn't survive. Allende's democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

#vincent bevins #the jakarta method #chile #guatemala #indonesia #usa #to read

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being confused as to why armand wants claudia dead when claudia is shown to be both savvy and ambitious enough to plan against powerful controlling beings + louis is shown to be unable to exist w/o her in s1 is just. why is the sky blue? why do gazelles mislike tigers?

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a continuation of the cosplay of coloniality extending into their carcereal institutions - all in design to make a show out of corralling and destroying claudia for the ‘sin’ of being created and trying to kill her maker.

#yn. #iwtv #iwtv s2

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The Laws of Being a Vampire

#iwtv #iwtv s2

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No matter how many times I see this movie, the trailer gets me pumped.

#rgu #adolescence of utena